Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 02:03:09 -0500 From: Gary Corcoran <garycor@comcast.net> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Multiple hard disk failures - coincidence ? Message-ID: <41C3D62D.7000808@comcast.net>
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First, I would've sent this to freebsd-ide, or freebsd-ata, but there *still* doesn't seem to be such mailing lists (WHY??) ... (isn't it about time for such a list, to join freebsd-scsi ? ;-) ) And please don't redirect me to -questions, as no-one who really knows anything reads that list any more... I've just had *THREE* Maxtor 250GB hard disk failures on my FreeBSD 4.10 server within a matter of days. One I could attribute to actual failure. Two made me suspicious. Three has me wondering if this is some software problem... (or a conspiracy (just kidding) ;-) ) I have 10 disks on this (home) server, and within the past week or two, three disks, all Maxtor 250GB disks, have started reporting "hard errors". All of the other disks except one are also Maxtor disks of various sizes, but it is ONLY the 250GB disks that are suddenly reporting errors. First it was one disk, then a few days ago another 250GB disk, and now the third (of four) 250GB disks is reporting errors. The first one to show errors is an "enterprise grade" 7Y250P0 Maxline II disk, which I expected to be reliable for a number of years. The other two now showing errors are 6Y250P0 Maxtor drives. They have all worked fine for many months, but are only about a year or less old. I suppose it is possible these errors may have shown up more than a week or two ago, because my windows machines, reaching them via samba, haven't shown any problems until today, and of course with almost 750GB of data, it's not all accessed over a short time span. I did a google search and found other people having unexpected Maxtor 250GB "hard error" failures as far back as the FreeBSD 4.6 days. Does anyone know if there is some problem with the FreeBSD IDE/ATA drivers that might cause/aggravate these problems with Maxtor 250GB drives? Is there something really specific to the Maxtor 250GB drives? Or are all the Maxtor 250GB drives that I thought were so reliable, really all just going to mush at the same time? :( I just can't accept that they would all go bad at almost the same time in my FreeBSD server - while Maxtor disks in my windows machines keep humming along. Help ? One frustrated disk consumer, Gary P.S. I *can't* be the first person to run into this problem: When one gets a "hard error" reported for a certain block number, how does one find out exactly *which* file or directory is now unreadable? With hundreds of thousands of megabytes on one disk, a manual search is not practical - somebody must have written a program to 'backtrack' a block number to a particular file name - no?
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